Gretchen Bender

Her style began to evolve, combining live television, documentary, and abstract photo-panels, frequently with a chaotic aesthetic. Bender often silkscreened phrases and words directly onto the television screens. These slogans typically included phrases like “Relax,” “I’m Going to Die,” and “People with AIDS.” Viewed through this augmented lens, each broadcast image appearing on the televisions became labeled with the jarring phrases printed on the screen. The superimposed texts became subliminal codes meant to awaken the viewer’s consciousness when encountering the controlled, mental-zombie state of television; and made viewers more critical of the content they were receiving and the various candy-coated images used to intrude them.

Bender also designed the credits for the TV show America's Most Wanted, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times suggested in 2004 "may have originated the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film, television and video art." She also directed music videos for such musicians as Babes in Toyland, edited music videos directed by Robert Longo, and designed sets for the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Molissa Fenley, including the former's Still/Here that New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce condemned.

Eventually showing with Metro Pictures, her mid-career retrospective was organized by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 1991, and toured internationally, as did her multimedia installations Total Recall (1987) and Dumping Core (1984). The former, along with Wild Dead (1984), which she showed at Danceteria, the New York City dance club, have been called her central installations from that decade. Total Recall, was an eight-channel installation with 24 TV monitors and two rear projections that combined corporate logos from TV commercials, computer-generated forms by Amber Denker, doctored clips from Salvador with a post-punk soundtrack by Stuart Argabright. She was included in the 1989 Whitney show "Image World: Art and Media Culture," with Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and David Salle and in 1992, "Contemporary Women Artists: Mixed Messages" with Kruger and Sherman again, and Nancy Dwyer, held at the Castellani Art Museum, on the campus of Niagara University in 1992. Her 42-foot-long work People in Pain, a vinyl field backlit by neon illuminating a series of movie titles that point to the cultural and narrative meanings of the films named, was included in the 1989 "Forest of Signs" show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and later, in 2014 in the Whitney Biennial. She taught video art at Hunter College in the 1990s.

She had her first New York solo gallery show in the East Village in 1983 at the Nature Morte Gallery. She appropriated images from the Neo-Expressionist painters of her generation, and in her more dramatic pieces put computerized patterns together with grisly images from mass murders. A theme throughout her work is the contrast between the power of corporations and technology with the struggle of individual human beings.

By 1982 Bender had found television to be a fruitful source of imagery that she could reprocess and recontexualize in her work. This became a differentiating advantage as most other artists at the time resisted using television because of the necessary technical skills. In a 1985 article in Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, Bender asserted that “artists should be spending their money on VCRs instead of paint and canvas.” This differentiation gave Bender the opportunity to exhibit widely at many locations, such as the alternative gallery Artists Space, and the progressive gallery Nature Morte.

Upon moving to New York in 1978, Bender befriended like-minded artists, including Eric Bogosian, Bill T. Jones, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Arnie Zane. Emboldened by this supportive community, Bender continued working with the silkscreen process but this time on square tin panels, arranging them into numerous shapes. At this same time, she gradually began to incorporate abstract computer graphics into her work that were generated from media images found in network television.

She earned a bachelor of fine arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973. While earning her bachelors, her instructors emphasized the decorative nature of studio art, which turned Bender away from the general art curriculum. It was only later, when visiting the university art gallery, that she was introduced to a group exhibition of experimental artworks. It was this experience that exposed her to a new mindset of exploring and communicating ideas and visions that drew her to engage in various cultural examinations of the time.

Gretchen Bender (1951 in Seaford, Delaware – 2004 in New York City) was an American artist who worked in film, video, and photography. She was from the so-called 1980s Pictures Generation of artists, which included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons and Richard Prince. These artists mixed elements of Conceptual Art and Pop Art, using images from popular culture to examine its powerful codes.